ALSA and MIDI on Banana Pi (Jessie)

[XTL]

For a lark I wanted to see if a BPi would do as a softsynth.

 

I started with the very nice 2.9 Jessie image^* and 4.x kernel, but noticed only then that there's no sound, so I installed the 3.4 packages. After booting, ALSA seems to be working fine wrt line sound output and mixer. I could also play MIDI files with fluidsynth fine and hear clear audio on headphones. Connecting a USB MIDI keyboard also gets detected and its ports show up.

 

Now, fluidsynth as a server won't start and neither does jackd. Both seem to complain about missing /dev/snd/seq. So I'm wondering if there's a kernel module or option missing or if it's an artifact of there being no actual MIDI synth chip available. But it looks like neither fluidsynth nor jack can register themselves for routing MIDI at all. There might of course be some unrelated problem that I haven't noticed.

 

The device is not in reach now so I don't have exact output, but I thought I'd throw this topic up for a start.

 

^* Thank you for the effort put into these! It's great to have ongoing development on these boards. Firstboot on 2.9 didn't work unless I resized the partition first to make some free space. I imagine this is probably fixed in a later image as the brokenness note on the page is gone.

[Igor]

Yes, it looks like this is not enabled in kernel. If you are in a rush try to compile yourself or wait for update. I hope it works. 

lsmod | grep -i seq

Jessie 2.9 was broken - latest image is fixed.

 

Thanks 

[Krister Zwinto Emtweden]

is there a dist at all that works with snd_seq?

I've been trying for almost two weeks now to get the midi working....

[Igor]

There are several kernels for different boards. On which board and kernel version are you trying this?

[Krister Zwinto Emtweden]

Lemaker banana pro

[Krister Zwinto Emtweden]

and could you please direct me to a dist that you KNOW works with USB MIDI

[Krister Zwinto Emtweden]

So far I've installed the jessie desktop vanilla, made an apt-get update and an apt-get dist-upgrade ....still no midi

[Krister Zwinto Emtweden]

I found a dist that works fine so now I'm a happy camper..

I built in the Banana pro into my Mixtrack pro (dj-mixer ) 

then 16.04-xenial-minimal-preview-bpi-m1-m1p-r1.img and LDXE

so now I've got it boot and autostart everything so I don't need keyboard or mouse.

[Igor]

If you would start with one of our Legacy build, you would probably end up with the same kernel and support for MIDI. Image which you choose are not supported so I am not sure you made any real progress.

 

If you want to use modern kernel (Vanilla), than this midi stuff must be enabled and that would be the best option. But this needs some extra effort.